


Refuge

by takethembystorm



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Angst, Angst and Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-05-25 05:43:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6182764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/takethembystorm/pseuds/takethembystorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Contains possible spoilers from Jackady.</p><p>“Join me,” Papillon says quietly, eyes gleaming.  “Join me, and help me, and I can bring your mother back.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sanctuary

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [clairelutra](http://clairelutra.tumblr.com) for putting up with me during the editing process.

“Join me,” Papillon— _his father—_ says quietly, eyes gleaming. “Join me, and help me, and I can bring your mother back. We can be a family again.”

Adrien hesitates and thinks about it for a second.

“Why didn’t Master Fu let you borrow them?” he asks, buying time. “The Miraculouses, I mean.”

Something ugly and hateful flares behind his father’s controlled expression. The butterflies around them stir in the wan purple light cast through the picture window.

“The old fool,” he mutters. “I don’t know. I asked for them and he simply refused me. When I tried to take them, he vanished. And then he had the _gall_ to hand one of them to my own son.”

His fists clench involuntarily around his cane before he looks up, calm and poised again. “But that is settled now. With your help, Ladybug will no longer be an issue, and then _everything_ will be fixed.”

“I haven’t agreed yet,” Adrien says, shifting his weight. Unease twists his guts as though he’d been stabbed with a corkscrew.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” his father says.

“I’m not,” Adrien says firmly. “You’ve hurt people. Killed people. You used my friends to do it, most of the time.”

“Because that old fool made it _necessary,_ ” his father hisses, taking a sudden step forwards. Adrien stumbles away. “I could have had what I needed and been _done_ with it if he hadn’t refused me."

“Necessary?” Adrien asks. “Necessary to terrorize Paris for months?”

“It was _his_ choice,” his father says. “ _His_ choice to make matters difficult. _His_ choice to bring things to ruination.” He holds out his hand to Adrien. “You can stop it,” he whispers. “Join me, and you can stop it.”

Adrien licks his lips. “You want me to help you capture Ladybug,” he says.

“If necessary.”

Adrien looks down at his father’s proffered hand, then up at his father’s face.

“No.”

Papillon’s expression shifts from pleading to an insane fury in a heartbeat, and the cane whips up and out in a disabling blow aimed at his temple. Adrien ducks the swipe, takes the second on the arm with a wince of pain, and rolls out of the way of the third as it hums at his side.

“Plagg!” he screams, and the kwami zips into the ring. There’s a flash of green-white light, and Papillon is no longer facing his teenaged son, but the seasoned superhero Chat Noir.

“So you have thrown in your lot with _them,_ ” Papillon says venomously.

“I don’t want to fight you,” Adrien says, backing away.

“Neither do I, son,” Papillon says, “but if I must”—he punctuates this with a lunge—“then I will!”

Adrien dodges the lunge and slips under Papillon’s arm. Before his father can make another grab for him, he leaps at the window, fist-first. He smashes through the glass, lands on the lawn outside, and with hardly a pause, gets his staff beneath him and vaults off into the streets.

* * *

Ladybug calls him two or three times, as Papillon’s latest akuma rampages through the streets. He doesn’t respond.

Someone’s femur pokes at him insistently as he settles back in the Parisian catacombs, shivering a little in the cool. He elbows it aside impatiently.

So. His father is a freaking supervillain. The same one that he and Ladybug have been fighting for months now. The same one who just wants his family to be whole again.

His chest aches with unspent sobs.

That wasn’t so bad, right? To want his family back together? His mother back? His father smiling and laughing again?

His father _couldn’t_ be a bad guy.

Right, because good guys always attacked their own sons, some treacherous part of his mind says.

“But it was necessary,” he mutters to himself.

Necessary? In what world was it necessary to attack your son, unprovoked? In what world was it necessary to _hurt_ people because you didn’t get what you wanted?

A memory niggles at his consciousness. Once, he’d asked his father why tyrants and despots and oligarchs seemed to be so common in a world that ought to have abhorred them. His father had merely responded, voice quiet and calm and resonant, “The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.” Well, apparently his father was one of the strong.

As was he, another part of him chimes in.

Yeah, but he didn’t go around _hurting_ people.

His staff rings again. He sighs and picks up.

“Hello?”

“Chat!” his Lady screeches. Something crashes noisily to the ground behind her. “Get over here and help me, you stupid cat!"

* * *

“What’s with you?” Ladybug asks him concernedly after the fight. “Is everything all right?”

Adrien hesitates. There was that whole prohibition on any information that could lead to their personal identities they’d agreed on, and this was about as personal as it got.

It was important, though. As important as it got.

“May we speak in private?” he asks her, quietly. Her Miraculous beeps, and a spot vanishes. “Our spot, Notre Dame, half an hour?”

“Sure,” she says, tossing out her yoyo. “See you there.”

His own Miraculous beeps as she zips away. He’s got four minutes.

He spots a grocery store nearby and trots in. People stop and stare as Chat Noir heads for the dairy section.

“Erm,” he says to the wide-eyed teenager working the counter. “I haven’t got any cash on me, but could I possibly have some cheese? Camembert for preference.”

“It’s important,” he adds a moment later.

He gets a wheel of cheese shoved at him before he can finish the last syllable in “important”.

“Um,” the teenager asks as he picks it up and starts hurrying towards the bathroom. “Could I have your autograph?”

He sighs, grabs the proffered pen, signs the proffered notepad, and runs into the bathroom and the nearest stall to get business done.

“Thank you,” he says to her after he comes back out. “I’ll come back and pay for it later, I promise.”

“No problem,” the teenager squeaks.

He tosses her a quick salute and leaves as quickly as he can. There’s usually been at least a week or two between attacks, but there’s no telling how quickly Papillon can churn out akuma when he’s really motivated.

He makes the rendezvous, but only just. Paranoia makes him disappear into the catacombs again a few times just to make sure that he’s lost any tail Papillon’s put on him. Sure, they’d never seen him pull out anything like that, but then again, no one would expect that Chat Noir had GPS tracking devices on his staff.

“Okay,” Ladybug says as he appears before her. “What’s up, Chat?”

“I know who Papillon is,” he says.

Ladybug’s eyes go wide. “You’re sure,” she says, a statement rather than a question.

He answers as though she’d asked anyways. “I’m absolutely sure.”

A beat, while both expect the other to say something.

“So who is it?” Ladybug asks.

Hoo boy. Adrien takes a couple of steadying breaths. “He’s my father.”

She does him the benefit of believing him. Still, it takes her a moment.

“God,” she mutters. “Do you know where he is?”

“At home. There’s an old observatory that got boarded up when we moved in.”

She nods. “Can you take us there?”

“Chat?” she says after a moment, when he doesn’t respond.

“I’m not going to fight him,” he says. “I haven’t gone to his side,” he says quickly, holding up his hands as her gaze sharpens on him. “He offered, I haven’t. But I won’t fight him.”

“Chat, he needs to be stopped,” she says.

“I know.”

“He’s hurt a lot of people.”

“I know,” he snarls. “I know that, I know all of that.” He glares at her. “But he is my father. My only family. I won’t—I can’t fight him.”

The atmosphere hums with tension for a second.

The tension breaks as his stomach growls.

“When was the last time you ate?” Ladybug asks.

He looks away. “I had some breakfast,” he mutters sullenly.

“It’s nearly dusk,” she says, “and going off of the Ladyblog’s Chat Noir sightings you’ve been running around all day.” She taps a thoughtful finger on her lips. “You can’t go home,” she thinks out loud, “you probably can’t just check into a hotel or something.”

“You get wireless on that thing?” he asks, gesturing at her yoyo.

“Hush.” She sucks on her cheeks thoughtfully for a second before she nods decisively. “Hide out until dark, two hours, maybe. Do you remember where Marinette lives?”

“Yes.”

“Go to her terrace. Be discreet. I’ll make sure that you’re welcome there.”

He looks down. “I shouldn’t,” he says. “They’ll be targets”—

“Shut up, Chat,” Ladybug says. “If Papillon gets a hold of you and your Miraculous because you’re tired and starving from being on the run for ages, everyone’s screwed. It’s a calculated risk."

Sometimes, he really hates it when she’s right. He nods.

“Right. Go to ground. Good luck, kitty.”

They separate without another word, Ladybug to Marinette’s place, presumably, and him back to the catacombs.

* * *

Two hours and the half-hour he takes to make it to the bakery through winding alleys and across dim rooftops pass without incident. He finds himself crouching low on Marinette’s terrace and knocks, _rap-tapta-tap-tap,_ on the trapdoor before he can remind himself of how much of a bad idea this is.

Marinette opens the door quietly, grabs his arm, and drags him in.

He drops, flailing, onto her bed.

“Princess,” he says, righting himself. She reaches up past him to close the trapdoor and latch it shut. “I’m so sorry about this.”

“It’s all right,” Marinette says, her face grim. He glances around her room. All of the curtains are drawn tightly closed, and any lights that might cast a shadow on them are turned off or are facing away from the windows. It’s a little paranoid—the curtains are of a heavy, opaque fabric—but with that little risk managed, he relaxes a little.

“Um,” he says, turning back to her. “Are your parents aware of what’s going”—

“Marinette!” a woman—probably her mother—calls up through the open trapdoor in Marinette’s floor. “I can hear company! Tell him to wash up, dinner’s almost done!”

He looks at her.

She shrugs. “You can say that they are,” she says. “Bathroom is down the stairs, make a U-turn, first door on the left.”

She clambers down to her bedroom floor, then down the stairs, disappearing through the floor.

Dinner is a quiet, interesting affair. Marinette is seated next to him, her parents across from them, with the television on behind them, sound muted. Tom is scowling, though more at the television than at him, which is good, because he’s fairly certain that the man could pick him up and break him in one hand.

“Missing persons report,” he rumbles to his wife. “Adrien. They aren’t saying how long.”

“Adrien’s missing?” Marinette says.

“Try the fish, Chat,” Sabine says. “Probably not for very long, dear.”

Chat tries not to flinch visibly at the mention of his name, and meekly peels off a few flakes of the steamed sea bass with the serving fork. Sabine rolls her eyes at him, reaches over, and gives him a bigger helping.

“You are as thin as a rail, dear,” she tells him. “Eat. There’s plenty. And try the chicken.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Cheng,” he says.

“Do Ladybug and Chat Noir do missing persons?” Tom muses as he helps himself to a section of Peking duck out of a styrofoam takeout box. “Well, not you at the moment, obviously, Chat Noir.”

“We’ve done a few,” Chat says. “Usually it’s not too hard, it’s just a kid who’s wandered off a little too far.”

“Have some of the sea cucumber,” Sabine says to Marinette. Marinette makes a face. “It’s good for you, dear.”

“I’ll try some,” Adrien says. Sabine holds out the plate and he plucks a few slices out with his chopsticks after a few tries. The conversation continues as he chews.

“Do you want the head?” Tom asks him after a minute. He holds up a roasted duck head, most of its neck attached.

Marinette leans away slightly. “That is disgusting, Dad,” she says flatly.

“It’s the best bit,” Tom protests.

“I’ll give it a try,” Adrien says. Tom plops it down in his bowl. He makes an attempt to nibble on it.

“You are disgusting, Chat,” Marinette says, shaking her head. “Can you pass the green beans, Mom?”

“She doesn’t like fish eyes, either,” Sabine comments as she hands the bowl of green beans over. “I am a failure as a mother.”

“Mom!”

Tom snorts as he cleans his bowl of a few last grains of rice and ladles it full of some steaming, gingery soup.

“So how long do you think he’s been missing?” Marinette asks.

“Usually the police don’t bother for forty-eight hours,” Sabine says as she peels the spine away from the fish. She removes the spine and the head with a twist and sets it aside.

“But he was at school the other day,” Marinette says.

“His father probably pulled some strings,” Tom says. “It’s too soon to worry, dear.”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Adrien says. “I’m sure Ladybug is on the job right now.”

“Making up for you, you slacker,” Marinette stage-mutters, elbowing him gently in the side. “Or maybe she’s being sane and having dinner or something.”

“No, I know my Lady,” he says, “she’s out there somewhere, vowing to never rest until Adrien’s strikingly handsome face is found and safe.”

Marinette flushes and looks away. “You just made it sound like a serial killer is going to peel off his face or something,” she says. “Great wording, Chat.”

Tom and Sabine burst out into badly suppressed laughter.

* * *

After a few bowls of sweet red bean soup each, Chat offers to help with the dishes, and finds himself next to Sabine, who’s washing.

“Need anything, boy?” Tom says, sticking his head in.

“Um, some cheese,” Adrien says. “For my kwami, the being that gives me my powers. And a mask or something, so that I can untransform.”

Tom nods and bellows up the stairs, “Marinette! You’ve got a commission! One mask that he can see out of!”

“Got it, Dad!” Marinette calls down.

“What kind of cheese?” Tom asks. “We’ve only got a few sorts, and maybe some cheese bread from today.”

“Any kind will do,” Adrien says, “but my kwami likes Camembert for preference.”

Tom wrinkles his nose. “Don’t think we have any of that,” he says. “I’ll see what we can do.”

He disappears around the corner, and soon enough Adrien can hear his heavy footsteps as he descends to the bakery below.

“So,” Sabine says after a minute. “Your father.”

“Yes,” Adrien says quietly.

“It is not my place,” Sabine says as she finishes washing a dish, “to tell you what to do, Chat. And you have already done so much for my family and for Paris.”

The clean, dripping plate clinks down next to him. He picks it up and begins drying it.

“In addition, I have too much personal gratitude to you to question your decisions.”

“Pardon?”

“You protected my daughter,” Sabine says. “Remember?”

He manages to chuckle a little. “Your daughter ended up saving me, well, the both of us, that time, Mrs. Cheng.”

“Please. Sabine.”

“She saved us both, Sabine,” he amends. He sets the dried plate aside and accepts the next. “A fat lot of good I was then,” he says softly.

A wet glob of suds smacks into his face. He turns, wiping at his cheek, to see Sabine looking at him with gentle reproof.

“Don’t say such a donkey thing,” Sabine says. “You have a good heart.”

“And a lot of good it’s done me.”

She chuckles silently, her chest and shoulders shaking as she turns back to the sink. “Haven’t you ever heard that your heart is a weapon the size of your fist?”

“That’s just a song, isn’t it?”

She shrugs and hands him a bowl. “Songs are important. Words are important. Anything that can uplift the human spirit is important.”

“You may be right.” The dried bowl goes atop the stack of plates with a clink. He picks up a plate.

“Your father loves you,” she says, “even if he is not terribly good at expressing it.”

Adrien doesn’t say anything.

“My father loved me, too,” she says. She purses her lips thoughtfully. “But he had the personality of a pig. He was a man of the old sort, the kind that believed that women ought to stay in the kitchen and do housework and raise the children and nothing else.”

She shrugs again, shoulders a little tense, eyes focused on her work. “It was not his fault. His father and his father before him and his father before him taught him that. It was all he knew.”

“He could have tried, though,” Adrien interjects quietly.

“Hindsight is easy,” Sabine says. “Education was not something that his kind of man wanted in a wife, and where I came from there wasn’t much of a living to be made except as a wife even until recently. But I wanted to learn. I wanted to explore. I was _adventurous._ ” She sets another bowl beside him.

“So we fought,” she says with a sigh. “We fought a lot. Eventually I took the first chance I had and left home and never looked back.”

She stops washing the bowl she’s holding. “By the time I forgave him he was dead,” she says. “I came home for the funeral with Tom and Marinette when she was about four.”

“I’m sorry,” Adrien says.

Sabine heaves out a sigh and starts scrubbing, a little harder than she had before.

“I am not trying to make you forgive him,” she says. “If you and Ladybug weren’t around Papillon would probably be considered a terrorist. A mass murderer. A monster. I am merely saying that good men sometimes do bad things for good reasons.”

Sabine finishes, rinses the bowl, and shuts off the tap. She turns to him. Adrien watches her in his peripheral vision.

“And in the end I came to the same conclusion that you did,” she says calmly. “My father could have tried. I’d like to think that he would have if anyone had challenged him.”

A pause, pregnant with sudden humming tension.

Adrien swallows.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says, voice thick. “He’s my father. He just wants Mom back. He just wants us to be a family again.   But he’s hurt so many people, and there are people I trust that don’t trust him, and I just don’t know what to do.”

The plate shatters in his grip.

“Oh, shit,” Adrien mutters. “God, I’m sorry, I’ll—I’ll pay for it”—

Sabine waves him off and brushes the fragments into the sink with her hand. “We have many plates,” she says. She considers him, his form slumped over the counter, his eyes fixed downwards.

“Do you want my advice, Chat Noir?” she says.

He nods, mutely.

“Do what you must. It is your family, your father, your fight. Your decision, ultimately. I believe that he must be stopped. I think that you do as well. But it is your choice, ultimately, to decide whether to act on it.”

Adrien blinks back a tear. “Bit of a tough choice,” he croaks.

Sabine nods, and places the dripping bowl on the counter. “Sometimes I imagine that the strong suffer as much as the powerless,” she says. “Those with a conscience, at least. It is simply that their greatest tormentor is themselves.”

Adrien nods and rises, back straight. “Thank you, Mrs. Cheng,” he says.

“What did I tell you about that?” she says, crossing her arms across her chest and raising an eyebrow at him.

He smiles wanly at her. “Thank you, Sabine. I am never going to be able to repay this”—

Sabine smiles at him and pulls him into a hug. “Oh, shut up. You are very welcome.”

She lets him back away a bit then nods decisively. “Now, off to bed. Marinette ought to have gotten that mask done now, so you can sleep in actual clothes and your kwami can have a rest. Tom will have gotten the cheese out, too.”

Adrien nods and heads for the dining room. “Thank you,” he says again, before he rounds the corner.

“Oh, and Adrien?” Sabine says. He freezes.

“If you want to repay me, be safe,” she says, face solemn. “Don’t break my daughter’s heart.”

Adrien nods, once. “I think I can keep that promise.”


	2. Siege

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sanctuary is only as safe as its guardians can make it against the persistence of its enemies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [pozolegirl](http://pozolegirl.tumblr.com/) for helping _tremendously_ with fleshing this chapter out, and many thanks to [clairelutra](http://clairelutra.tumblr.com/) and [miraculousturtle](http://miraculousturtle.tumblr.com/) for helping edit. I cannot give any of them any higher recommendation.
> 
> Inspiration for the shower scene is taken from pozolegirl.

Being on the run, Adrien discovers, is mostly waiting.

It isn’t the fun sort of waiting, either.  The fun sort of waiting is when he’s early to patrol and something is infinitesimally different about the world and just knows in his bones that his Lady is going to be with him soon.  The fun sort of waiting is when he’s been lying in ambush for an hour, the supervillain whose day is going to be ruined is half a step from where they need to be, and his fighter’s reflexes have been tightened to a whining hum by Plagg’s cattish instincts.

On the other hand, it’s not exactly the boring kind of waiting, the kind stitched together from long, empty periods of nothing with the only interruption the occasional “sweet baby Jesus when will this end” or “god I’m starving” running through his head.

Well, he isn’t hungry by any measure, not with Tom and Sabine asking him if he wants to try this, or taste-test this, or “Marinette came up with this recipe and we’re too afraid to try it” that—that one had been rather good, he had no idea what they were talking about—to the point where even Plagg is if not full, at least satiated.  But his internment here still somehow manages to combine the worst of both worlds.  His mind hums with a mad buzzing screech, synapses frying as they’re overclocked, like an engine trying to move a truck stuck in a meter of swamp.

There has got to be something he can do, he repeats to himself.  Something he can do aside from just sitting on his ass here, watching Papillon attack his school and classmates over Alya’s live feed, something he can do to help Ladybug as he watches her fight off his latest monster, the third one in as many days.  For crying out loud he’s a block away, and _Le Chat Noir_ can _book_ it when he needs to.

Out and back, like a shot.

He can do it; he _ought_ to do it, he has a responsibility to protect the innocent from Papillon, to see them safe from harm.

There’s a twisting in his guts as he’s reminded of exactly he’s violating that responsibility at the moment.

“Don’t try it,” Sabine says from across the room, making him jump and come down with a _thwumph_ on the sofa.  He looks guiltily over his shoulder.

Sabine peers at him knowingly over a pair of reading glasses as she hammers away at a keyboard; right, she’s handling someone’s accounts.

“The whole point of this,” she says, returning her gaze back to her screen, “is to keep you safe.  To keep you safe, we need to keep you hidden.  And since it is currently broad daylight out”—she pauses as a particularly loud crash reverberates through the speakers of Adrien’s borrowed laptop, and waits a second more as he mutes the volume—“and your outfit is black, you are very, very visible right now.”

A quick smile flickers across her face.  “I think we can both agree that it would be impossible for you to avoid being spotted, and counterproductive if you were to be seen around here.  The idea is to keep him uncertain as to where you are, after all.”

“Yes, Sabine,” Adrien says meekly, turning back to the laptop.  Onscreen, a flurry of pink-glowing red-and-black ladybugs hum past Alya’s camera, and Ladybug sags against a wall briefly, breathing hard.  The view blurs as Alya thumps forwards.  Adrien unmutes the feed and turns the volume down.

“—dybug, Ladybug!” Alya calls.  “Do you have a minute?”

“Maybe a few,” Ladybug says with a quick laugh.  Alya’s phone shoots up, Ladybug appearing in the mildly shaky frame.  “But,” she says hastily, as Alya inhales, “no questions about my identity.  Non-negotiable.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Alya says.

“Right,” Ladybug says, voice heavy with skepticism.

“I wasn’t!”  Alya clears her throat.  “Anyways, first question.  Where was Chat Noir?”

Ladybug pauses.  “What do you mean?”

“Well, since your debut there’ve been fewer than a dozen fights where he wasn’t around but never several in a row like the last,” Alya says, her words rattling out in a rapid stream.  “Is anything wrong?  Is Chat Noir preparing for a solo gig in some other city?”

He can practically feel Alya’s eyes gleaming as she leans towards Ladybug.  “Are you two having a lover’s spat?”

Ladybug’s gaze turns flat and unamused.  “I don’t know, no, and definitely no.  As I’ve said before, Chat Noir and I are good friends, but aside from that our relationship is entirely professional.  Next.”

“All right, all right,” Alya says, waving a conciliatory hand.  “Just joking.”

Ladybug rolls her eyes, crossing her arms across her chest, but a small smile works its way back onto her face.

“All right, then.”  Alya thinks for a moment.  “There’s been a lot of noise about the sudden disappearance of Adrien Agreste.  Specifically, it’s been three days and the police haven’t turned up a single lead yet.  Are you and Chat Noir going to be working this case as well?”

Ladybug goes still, her smile turning a little waxen.

Finally she says, “I would like for you to keep in mind that we are only two people.  We are faster and stronger than most people, but that doesn’t make up for numbers and resources.  Yes”—a beep interrupts her momentarily, and the corners of her mouth tighten—“we have been cooperating with the appropriate authorities, but please don’t expect any miracles.  We aren’t really built for search and rescue.”

“Do you think his disappearance is related to the sudden outbreak of supervillains?” Alya asks.  “Usually they don’t show up this frequently.”

“I honestly can’t tell you,” Ladybug says.  “We know very, very little about the man behind these attacks, including his motivations and the depths to which he’ll sink.”

“A guess, then?”

Ladybug shrugs.  “This is the kind of man who refuses to meet us himself and sends his proxies, innocent people having a bad day, mostly, to fight us.  I wouldn’t be surprised.”

She reaches up and fingers an earring.  “I’m sorry to rush you, but do you have any more questions?”

Alya opens her mouth.

“That aren’t about my identity, my nonexistent love life with Chat Noir, my love life period, or anything else like that.”

Alya shuts her mouth.  Adrien can practically feel her pout.

“Right then, I need to go.  Good talking to you,” Ladybug says before she sprints away.

Alya turns her camera towards her and starts talking, but Adrien’s interest peters away exponentially with Ladybug’s departure.  He closes the page with a sigh as Plagg floats over, nibbling on a block of cheddar half the size of Adrien’s head.

“You’re moping again.”

“No I’m not,” Adrien growls.

“Yes you are,” Plagg says.  The kwami unhinges its jaw, snake-like, and gulps the cheese down in one enormous bite.  “What’s the matter?”

Adrien shoots a wary glance towards Sabine before he leans in towards Plagg.  “I am not comfortable hanging around here,” he says lowly, resting his elbows on his knees.

“You’d rather go back to home sweet home?” Plagg replies.  “Trust me, kid, you’re best off here.”

“You’re just saying that because they keep feeding you,” Adrien says.  “Look, are you absolutely sure that he can’t find us here?”

“Let me assure you that there is no way that I am aware of that he could possibly find you,” Plagg says.  “Bet on it.”

* * *

Three days.  Three blasted days.  Three blasted days and not a sign of his son, either as Adrien or as Chat Noir.

Gabriel Agreste paces the length of his office once, shoes clacking against the floor with metronomic precision.  His path takes him back behind his desk, where he sits, perching on the edge of his chair, folding his hands before him on the cool, smooth hardwood of his desk.  A full three seconds pass before he springs up again and makes another circuit of his office.

A knock comes at his door, a sharp, deliberate _rap-rap-rap_.

“Enter,” he commands.

Nathalie inches open the door and takes a few steps in.  Gabriel sets his foot down with a final _clack_ and turns to look at her.

“Nothing yet,” Nathalie says.  “The police have spoken with all of his classmates and all of his teachers, but found nothing suspicious.  None of them know where he might have gone either.”

“No other leads?”

“No sir.”

Gabriel’s upper lip peels away from his teeth in a silent snarl.  Nathalie takes a discreet step back.

“Three days,” he mutters to himself, “and not a thing.  Utter incompetence."

His gaze latches onto Nathalie again.  “Keep me updated.  Look into alternate avenues in the meantime."

“Yes sir.”  Nathalie turns on a heel and walks out, shutting the door behind her.

Gabriel waits for the sound of her heels to die away, then waits a minute more.

So.  The first attack had been random, but had succeeded in drawing him out, if only momentarily.  The second, directed at the hotel, and the third, directed at the school, hadn’t had the same effect; so it would seem that Adrien was either deliberately ignoring them—unlikely—or that he was hiding away someplace where he would not be aware of the attacks—also unlikely.

The third and most likely possibility is that he’s sheltering with one of his classmates.

Gabriel explores this for a minute, turning the idea over in his mind.  Adrien is by all accounts well-liked by his peers, but so much so that they would harbor him even after the most innocuous visit from the police?  Unlikely, aside from his inner circle of friends.

That at least limits the list of targets, and hopefully the potential collateral, significantly.

The attack on the school today suggests that he isn’t hiding away in the basement or someplace in the crawlspaces.  The attack on Chloe’s home yesterday with the same lack of intervention suggests that he isn’t there, either.

Which leaves only that irritating Nino boy.

After a second more, Gabriel adds two names to the list: Nino’s girlfriend Alya, and Alya’s friend Marinette.

And now it is merely a matter of checking names off of the list, presuming that Adrien isn’t moving between their homes; an unlikely possibility given the level of coordination required and the amount of risk presented.

“Nuuru,” he says crisply to the room at large.  “Attend.”

* * *

He’s getting close, Plagg,” Adrien says quietly, itching at a corner of the domino mask Marinette had thrown together for him.

It’s much later, after dinner, but the thought of some akuma or worse, Papillon himself bursting through the door had refused to leave his mind, like some tunneling botfly larva avoiding the tweezers.

“No he isn’t,” Plagg says, idly batting a ball of fluffed-up lint around on the dining room table.  “You saw the news.  No one has a clue where you are.”

Adrien glances warily at Tom, who’s sitting on the couch, flipping idly through a book, and Sabine, who had been watching a Chinese news channel but is now sleeping with her head pillowed on Tom’s lap, mouth open, snoring quietly.  He glances up at the stairs, but Marinette doesn’t pop in suddenly.  He allows himself to relax a little.

“Keep it down,” he says, although they’re both half-whispering as it is.  “And look, I just have a feeling about this.  He’s smart and resourceful.  The police have already come by and he’s going to know everything that _they_ know soon enough.”

“And they know nothing,” Plagg says.  “Trust me on this, we’re safe for now.”

“For _now,_ ” Adrien insists.

Plagg sighs, bats the lint ball off of the table, and zips over to hover in front of Adrien.  “Look,” the kwami says, all business now, “I’ve been around for a while.  I know how your cops do business, they’re not going to come snooping around here any more than they already have unless they have a really good reason, which you haven’t given them.”

Adrien sighs and slumps down into his chair.  “Is there any _other_ way that he can track us down?” he asks after a few minutes.  “Anything magical, maybe?”

“Nah,” Plagg says dismissively.  “Nuuru—“

“Nuh-oo-who?”

“His kwami doesn’t have anything like that.  He can sense the emotional states of people around him and shares a mild psychic link with the people he gives powers to, but that’s it.”

“Ah.”  Adrien relaxes a little before a thought strikes him and his guts clench in sheer reaction.

“Plagg?” he says slowly.

“What?” the kwami says testily.

“Papillon isn’t stupid, he isn’t throwing a temper tantrum with these attacks,” Adrien says, sudden terror making his voice a little high.  “What if there’s a pattern?”

Plagg holds up both paws in a gesture to stop.  “Before you start panicking,” Plagg says, “I’m getting Ladybug’s kwami.”

“What?  Why?”

“Because I’m no good at this whole reassuring business and you are obviously overreacting.”  Plagg zips through the ceiling with an electric _zing_ without further preamble.  Adrien can hear Marinette’s startled yelp and a second, much fainter _zing_ a second later as the kwami goes through the roof.

Adrien settles down to wait, crossing his arms across his chest and drumming his fingers idly on a bicep.  It’s no more than five or six minutes before he hears the _zing_ of Plagg’s return through the roof.

It’s weird, though.  The sound had been staggered, a _zi-zing_ rather than a single—

Before he has any time to reflect on this, there’s another _zi-zing_ and Plagg is floating before him.  To the spirit’s left is another kwami, of the same general dimensions but built on a smaller scale, its coloration a brilliant, familiar red instead of charcoal black, with a large black spot on its forehead.

Ladybug’s kwami.

“Uh, hi,” he says weakly.

“I wish we could’ve met under better circumstances,” the red kwami says.  “My name is Tikki.  We will hopefully have time for proper introductions later.”

“So, uh,” Adrien says after a moment.  “Ladybug’s nearby, is she?”

“She’s keeping an eye on things,” Tikki says, “discreetly.  What pattern are you seeing?”

The kwami’s tone is polite, but crisp with mild rebuke.  Adrien gets back on track.  “I think he’s hitting places where he thinks I’ll be,” he says.  “He went after Chloe’s place and school with those last two attacks—“

Plagg interrupts with a loud, heartfelt groan.  “Oh, come on.”

“All I’m saying is that he isn’t stupid, and he’s not attacking because he’s throwing a temper tantrum,” Adrien replies, a little heatedly.  “He’s doing this for a reason, and the only thing that makes sense is that he’s trying to flush me out.”

“It’s your paranoia talking,” Plagg argues, before Tikki holds up a tiny paw for silence.

“Chat,” Tikki says, “you have two data points.  It isn’t a pattern, it’s a guess.”  Tikki glances at Plagg for a moment.  “That being said, you may be on to something.”

“Oh, come on,” Plagg repeats, more loudly.

“Plagg, shut up,” Adrien says under his breath.

Adrien blows out a quick breath and glances around.  Tom is looking at him with one eyebrow raised, his book still in one massive hand, the other stroking gently along Sabine’s arm.  Sabine snorts and turns slightly.

“I’m just going to go up to bed,” Adrien says with a disarming smile.

“All right,” Tom says.  “Goodnight, son.”

“Okay,” Adrien says as he clambers up the stairs.  “Right, we’re getting out of here, we’re getting out of here _now_ , Plagg.”

“That is a very bad idea,” Plagg says, grabbing onto a lock of Adrien’s hair and hauling.  “Of your bad ideas this is pretty far down the list.”

Tikki joins in, shoving at Adrien’s chest.  “You’re safe here,” the kwami pleads.

“ _They_ aren’t,” Adrien replies.  “I’m getting—“

He trails off as he realizes that he’s halfway through the trapdoor and that Marinette is staring at him.  Her eyes flicker to Plagg, then to Tikki, growing fractionally wider.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Adrien says as the kwami zip behind him and try to look inconspicuous.  “Uh, the red one’s Ladybug’s, like Plagg for me, it’s nothing to, uh, worry about.”

Marinette stares a second more at Tikki.

“I’m just,” she finally says, “uh, gonna go down.  For, stuff.”

Adrien steps aside as Marinette hurries down the stairs.  The moment the trapdoor closes, he makes towards the nearest window.

“Plagg, claws out,” he commands.  A flash of green-white lightning engulfs him.

“Just wait and hear me out!” Tikki pleads as Chat Noir takes another step forwards.  The kwami zips in front of him, little arms and legs outstretched.

Adrien pauses.  “Thirty seconds,” he says.

“Right now, _if_ you’re right,” Tikki says, the words coming out so quickly that they run into one another on their way out, “he’s shooting blindly.  But if you’re _seen_ , that changes everything.  He won’t need to guess, then: he’ll _know_.”

The kwami’s big eyes stare into Adrien’s own.  “Please stay here,” Tikki says.  “For your own good, stay here.”

Adrien considers the point, but shakes his head.  “Too much of a risk in the long term.  I can get out of here quickly enough that I won’t be seen, and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Chat,” Tikki pleads again, but stops and zips away as someone opens the trapdoor leading to downstairs.

“Um, what are you doing, Chat?” Marinette asks as Adrien turns.

“Oh, nothing,” he lies, as cheerily as he can manage.  “Just thinking.  I think better in the, ah, suit sometimes.”

Marinette blinks at him once or twice.  “Right,” she says weakly.  “So, um.  That’s Ladybug’s kwami?”

“Yeah,” Adrien says.  “The red one, right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”  Marinette brushes a few stray strands of hair behind an ear.  “My parents never, uh, saw one of them, well, hers before, that’s why I was down there, uh, asking them.”

“You, uh, you wouldn’t know who Ladybug is?” she adds after a moment.

“No,” Adrien answers.  “We agreed to keep our identities secret, for various reasons.”

“Well, I’m just going to have an early night, then,” Adrien says after a few more seconds.  A sudden idea sparks across his brain.  “Hey, I’m sorry to be a burden, but do you have any spare blankets?”

Marinette’s expression shifts into a look trapped between exasperated amusement and complete and utter disdain, and Adrien can’t help but grin a little in relief at the familiar sight.

“You already have half a dozen,” Marinette says with a shake of her head.  She walks towards her closet regardless, Adrien a pace behind and a step to the side.  She opens it to reveal a space packed wall to wall with dresses and shirts and jackets on hangers, a few shelves and space-makers with neatly folded and stacked clothing, and on a high shelf almost too high for her to reach, a mess of piled blankets, the space little more than half-full.

“Cats like warmth.”

“You are no more a cat than Ladybug is a flying spotted insect,” Marinette says, hauling down a puffy comforter and tossing it over her shoulder.

“I’m sorry, but how do you know that she isn’t?” Adrien says with a laugh, catching another blanket and tossing both onto the chaise lounge.  “For all you know she flies around eating aphids in her spare time.”

Marinette shudders and tosses him another blanket.

“No, she doesn’t,” Marinette says firmly.  She gropes around for a moment on tip-toe.  “I think that’s all of them.”

“It is,” Adrien says.  “Thank you.”  He tosses both onto the lounge, then stretches and yawns as Marinette turns.

“Well, goodnight, Princess,” he says.

Marinette studies him for a moment before she replies, “Goodnight, Chat,” and walks past him to her desk.

Adrien waits an hour, maybe an hour fifteen, until Marinette’s head has thumped onto her sketchbook and her breathing has smoothed out into a gentle rhythm before he makes his move.

It’s the work of a few minutes to turn the extra blankets into something approximating his general body shape; it takes a few minutes more to turn most of a ball of yarn into a mass of threads that might at a glance look like his hair.  He arranges both to his satisfaction and steps back.

Marinette snorts and shifts slightly in her sleep.

Adrien pauses, sighs, and picks her up as gently as he can.  Her head lolls with a gentle pendulum motion as he climbs the stairs to her bed, and she stirs restlessly as he lays her down and tucks her in.

He waits a second more.  When she fails to wake, he reaches up, unlatches her skylight, pushes it open, and pulls himself through.

Tikki flies in front of him as he steps towards the railing.  “Adrien,” the little kwami whispers in a pleading whine.  “Please don’t do this.”

“I’m not,” Adrien replies.  “Aren’t you supposed to be hanging around Ladybug, in case she needs you?”

“She’s close,” Tikki reassures him.  “Then what are you doing?”

“Chat Noir’s going to be seen around town,” he says.  “He’s going to be seen everywhere but around here.”  He glances at Tikki.  “Look, I need to draw some of the heat off of here.”

Tikki’s mouth opens, but Adrien cuts off the incipient protest.  “I know, I know, it’s dangerous,” he growls.  “But I’ve got to do something.”

“Please don’t tell Ladybug,” he adds a second later, “she’ll just get on my case about this.”

“Adrien?”

He turns to face the little spirit wringing its paws in worry.  “Yeah?”

“Please, please be careful.”

“I will.”

* * *

Gabriel listens to the storm of emotions as he stands and waits, patient as a hawk.  There, he hears the piccolo strains of irritation, there the low basso thrum of a deep hurt, there the shrieking screech of anger, all with their little vibratos and tremors, crescendos and decrescendos as people move in chords across his circle of influence.

In spite of his nightly attempts to confuse him, he’s fairly certain of Adrien’s general location now.  He’d stayed up last night, plotting out the location of Chat Noir’s recent sightings, and they’d been all over Paris, a random scatter that had offered no clues until he’d realized the only place that Chat Noir _hadn’t_ been spotted had been the area immediately around Notre Dame, an area which included the Dupain-Cheng bakery.  Tonight will serve to confirm that suspicion, and then—

In the gloom of his tower, Gabriel smiles.

Then it will be time to bring this farce to a close.

* * *

Adrien hurls himself skyward, aiming for as much hang time as possible.  Someone gasps and points; good.

It’s only been three nights, but already the Ladyblog is exploding with news of Chat Noir’s mysterious dis- and reappearance.  It’s mostly just idle speculation, tacitly encouraged by Alya, but it’s enough.  All he needs is the general news that he’s been sighted.  Hopefully, it’s working.

Adrien makes another quick circuit of the rooftops before he dives into the deep shadows of the alleys.

Tikki zips out to meet him as he closes on the bakery.

“I wasn’t seen,” Adrien assures the spirit in a low hiss as he darts across a street.

“That wasn’t what I was going to say, but okay,” Tikki says as Adrien hops lightly onto the terrace and slides through the skylight in one smooth motion, closing it behind him as he catches the lip of the portal.  He drops to the floor of Marinette’s room, landing on all fours with a quiet _thmp_.

“Then what were you going to say?” Adrien says over his shoulder as he stalks towards the blanket-laden lounge.  “Plagg, claws in.”

He closes his eyes against the wash of green-white light that pours over him like cool fire.

His next step is abbreviated abruptly as he runs into someone in his momentary blindness, who bounces off of him with a startled yelp.  Adrien’s hands shoot out automatically, grabbing their arms.

He opens his eyes.

Marinette dangles from his grasp, a towel covering her eyes and half-obscuring her face.  A mass of damp, strawberry-scented hair droops from underneath it.  A second towel is wrapped tightly about her chest, thank god, but it’s too short to cover much of her legs, her long, smooth, toned—he jerks his gaze away, a blush rampaging its way up from his chest towards his cheeks.

“Oh, god, I’m sorry,” Adrien babbles as he helps Marinette upright.  She pulls the towel from her head, squinting in the gloom.

“Chat?” Marinette says.  Her eyes dart to the fake hair on the lounge, then back to him.  “What the hell are you—what are you—what?”

She glances back at the lounge, studying it more fully; when she turns back to him, her gaze is sharp, practically a mirror of his father’s own.  “Stay,” she commands.  “Face that way.”

He turns his back on her as she strides to her closet.  There’s some rustling.

“All right, turn around,” she says, tone brisk.

Marinette plops herself down on her chair, sitting cross-legged in her form-fitting sweatpants—eyes, not legs, Adrien chants in his head, eyes, not legs—combing her hair out roughly with her fingers.  She’s a bit hindered by the sleeves of her overlarge sweatshirt, but she manages.

“What have you been doing,” she says finally.

“I’ve been running interference,” he says, “trying to draw some of the heat away from here, when it comes down.”

“In other words,” she says, “you’ve been unnecessarily exposing yourself.”

“Necessarily,” he corrects, gently.  “Tikki, Plagg, tell her.”

The two spirits manage to get the entire explanation through in around a minute.  Marinette sits quietly as they finish, drying her hands absent-mindedly on her sweatshirt.

“I agree with Tikki,” she says.  “Whatever you think you’re accomplishing, it’s more of a risk than just staying put.”

“Marinette,” he tries to argue.

“Look, I’m not ignorant about the threats,” she interrupts, “and frankly I wasn’t ignorant when I agreed—“

“You were ignorant about this,” Adrien hisses.

The silence that follows has the quality of the silence that follows the tolling of a great bell.

“Look,” Adrien finally says.  “In point of fact, I am not your guest.  I am your parents’ guest.  Let’s put it to them."

“Chat, we are _not_ getting my parents involved in this—“

“Yes, we are,” he snarls, rising.  “This is my family, and my business.  I’m not going to see anyone else hurt because of it!  They deserve to know of the risks!”

“God, I knew you were stupid, Chat, but not this stupid,” Marinette spits, rising and positioning herself between him and the trapdoor.  “If Papillon gets what he wants then it’s _everyone’s_ problem.”

“Move,” Adrien snarls, a low rumbling growl building in his chest.  “Or be moved.”  Marinette blanches at the sound, but squares her shoulders nonetheless.

Adrien walks forwards as Marinette sticks out her hands and shoves at his chest.

* * *

Gabriel smiles, white teeth glinting in the pale moonlight.

* * *

The explosion cracks the windows and rocks the building, throwing Adrien from his feet as he takes another step forwards.  He lands on elbows and knees, just barely managing to keep from squashing Marinette beneath him.

“What the hell?” they say, voices in sync.

Another explosion rumbles through the building as acrid tendrils of smoke fill their nostrils.  “What the hell?” Adrien says again, still half-frozen in shock.

The third explosion blows out several windows completely, sending glass shards hissing into the room.  Adrien drops himself down over Marinette, clutching her close as the murderous spray thuds into the floor around them.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Adrien hisses in a near-hysterical whisper as the thought strikes him.  “Oh, _shit_ , he’s found me, he’s found me—“

“Chat,” Marinette says as she manages to wriggle her arms up in between them, palms flat against his chest.

“— _nononono,_ ” he whimpers, curling more tightly around her as another explosion rattles the glass remaining in the windows.  “ _God,_ I knew this was going to happen, _I knew this was going to happen_ —“

“Chat!” Marinette shouts, punctuating the word with a hard shove at his chest.  It gives her just enough space to reach up and slap him, hard, across a cheek.  He focuses on her, his breathing slowing marginally from its rapid pace.

“I need you to let go of me,” she says slowly and deliberately.  “I need you to get out there, and hold them off until Ladybug gets here.  Nod if you understand.”

Adrien nods twice, jerkily, and stands as the building rumbles from another explosion.  Marinette rolls over and scrabbles at the trapdoor, her fingers searching for the handle in the dim light.

“Plagg, claws out!”  Chat Noir’s claws and his fingers smash easily through the wood; a hard jerk tears the door from its hinges.  “Tikki, get to Ladybug, get to her _now._ ”

“Chat—“

Adrien’s head whips around and he stares at Marinette, her face pale in the growing orange light but rigid with control.

“Be careful,” she says, her voice trembling only slightly.  “Please.”

Adrien gives her a tight nod then shoves her lightly towards the stairs.  “Get your parents out,” he tells her.  “I’ll handle this.”

Adrien turns to the windows as Marinette clambers down the stairs, shouting at the top of her lungs.  Distinct phrases are blurred into incomprehensibility as blood pounds through his ears to the rhythm of his suddenly racing heart.  He takes two steps backwards and breathes in, deeply.

Then he takes one lunging stride that splinters the floorboards beneath his feet with the force of it and hurls himself through the nearest window, fist-first.

As he sails out on a nearly horizontal trajectory over the street, his eyes flick over the scene below, his thoughts running rabbit-fast in time with his heart.  A man in one of Papillon’s typically outlandish outfits, this one featuring almost comically large bandoliers beneath a knee-length greatcoat, stands in the middle of the street before the bakery, his face illuminated yellow-orange by the fire.  Around him lie the twisted wreckages of burning cars, dark figures slumped within.  A few pedestrians are sprinting away from the scene; one’s face is illuminated by a cellphone screen as she holds it to her mouth.  She’s probably dialing the police.

Adrien dismisses the last few details as immaterial for the moment; he needs to focus on keeping Marinette and Sabine and Tom from being hurt.

His eyes flick upwards to the building opposite the bakery, its façade rapidly growing larger in his field of vision.  Adrenaline-fueled calculations rush through his head before the numbers solidify, velocities and angles locked into compliance.

As gravity finally grabs hold of him, Adrien tucks his legs in, turning a neat one-eighty in the air; he plants his feet on the building opposite the bakery, angles himself appropriately, and pushes off with a yell that is equal parts fury and terror.  The masonry shatters and flies off in the opposite direction as he rockets downwards.

The man has only just turned to face him before his fist hammers into the man’s jaw, his momentum carrying him through into a full-body tackle that sends the both of them rolling down the street.  Adrien ends up on the bottom; as the man rears back, a flaming Molotov cocktail in his hand, Adrien draws his knees up to his chest and kicks upwards and forwards, lashing out with his heels.  The kick slams squarely into the man’s belly, launching the two of them apart.

Adrien rolls to his feet as the man hits the ground maybe ten meters away and launches himself forwards again, aiming a flying knee at the man’s skull.  It connects with a _crack_ that feels as though it comes more from his knee than the man’s head, but connects nevertheless; the man’s head snaps back violently.  Adrien grabs the man by the shoulders as he staggers back and pulls down with all of his considerable strength, driving his knee into the bottom of the man’s jaw, this time.

He’s got to keep up the momentum, Adrien repeats to himself in a half-panicked mantra.  Keep up the momentum, press the attack, keep him close and press the attack, never give him a moment’s breath, keep up the flow of elbow strikes and knee strikes and punches, keep it up and—shit!

The man manages to dodge aside from a looping roundhouse punch aimed at his jaw and ducks beneath an awkward kick.  With the clarity of adrenaline perception, Adrien watches as the man reverses his grip on the Molotov in his hand and brings it down like a bludgeon.

On sheer instinct, Adrien tries to block the incoming blow.  Pain blossoms in a dull red flare across Adrien’s consciousness as the man shatters the bottle across his upraised arm, dragging the jagged remains down his ribs.  Accelerant, smelling mostly of alcohol, splashes across his face and torso; a heartbeat later, the burning rag that serves as a fuse lights the vapor with a _fwoomph_ and a completely disproportionate concussive _whud_ that blows the two of them apart.

Okay, some icy-clear part of Adrien’s mind remarks under the crimson rage and shrieking yellow fear, getting stabbed with glass had hurt.

Being on fire _hurts._

He can feel the searing heat as it splashes across him like a bath of molten lead, feel it in his scalp and his face and his neck and shoulders, feel it as it consumes him head to toes, as it eats away at skin and muscle and bone, melting away subcutaneous fat, searing away nerves and boiling his blood in his veins, skin blackening and peeling away like the pages of a flaming book—

Higher thought shuts down under the barrage of screaming pain, leaving behind only brainstem-deep animal fight-or-flight responses, and then just fight.  Everything melts away into one of two base instincts.

_Protect._

_Kill._

Adrien swipes the burning accelerant from his eyes as he rises, finds the man, and starts stalking forwards, pulling his staff free.  A pair of Moltovs sail towards him but he swipes them from the air with a swing of his staff as his stalk turns into a trot.  A fourth Molotov sails past his head as his trot turns into a sprint, and the concussive wave of the explosion carries him forwards as he screams in.

The man barely dodges the first punch but fails to dodge the following blow with the staff that cracks into the side of his knee.  He whips out an unlit Molotov from somewhere and produces a Zippo lighter like a magician whipping out a card; Adrien kicks him viciously in a kidney before the man has a chance to do anything more.

The man stumbles away with a gasp of pain, dropping the Molotov but clutching the lighter tightly in a fist.  Adrien snarls and whips his staff down on the man’s wrist, but all the man does is clutch the hand tighter to his chest.

Time to play hardball, then.  A swift jab into the man’s stomach makes him double over, bringing his face within range; Adrien lashes out with his claws, raking them across the man’s eyes.

Damn.  The firebomb-thrower is blessed with the characteristic invulnerability of the akuma-possessed, but the man flinches away and to the right on pure reflex anyways.  Adrien grabs him by the throat and helps him through the rest of the motion, slamming his head into the asphalt with enough force to crater it before he slams the toe of one of his heavy boots into the man’s throat.  The man rolls with the blow, softening some of the impact, and comes up with yet another Molotov in his hand.  Adrien strikes out with the staff and shatters the bottle at the neck.

The man thinks fast on his feet, though; as the bottle falls, the man flicks his lighter to life and swipes it out in an arc in front of him.  The accelerant ignites into a billowing, concealing wall of fire as it spills from the bottle.

It’s a good move, Adrien admits.  The fireball would generate an instinctual reaction to shy away, to cover his eyes and shield them from the sudden light, to perhaps move away from the sudden bloom of heat to avoid potential burns.

Chat Noir doesn’t give two shits.  He leaps through the fire, ducks beneath a clumsy swipe with a bottle, and completes the motion with a spinning back kick that connects with a solid _whumph_ into the man’s sternum.  The man goes flying, slamming into a still-burning car hard enough to rock it off of its wheels.  Adrien snarls in savage satisfaction at the pain that flickers briefly across the man’s face.

Of course, things have to get tricky then.

As Adrien hurls himself forwards, the man pulls aside a flap of his baggy trenchcoat with one hand and yanks the pins on a pair of cylindrical grenades with the other.  The same motion tugs them free of the bandolier from which they hang, and they drop with a clatter to the ground, opaque smoke spewing forth almost explosively.  In the second it takes for Adrien to reach the man, the two smoke grenades have already blanketed the area in an impenetrable, eye-watering, haze; his arm, as his hand lashes out to seize the front of the man’s coat, seems to disappear up to the elbow.

His claws tear into heavy canvas, and Adrien lowers his head as he pulls hard, so that his forehead will crash into the man’s nose with hopefully bone-splintering force.

His forehead whiffs through empty air as he pulls back the empty coat.  He immediately ducks and rolls off to the side, staying in a low crouch as he sprints clear; a firebomb smashes into the ground exactly where he had been a moment before.

Adrien stops, digging his claws into the street, and goes still.

For a moment there’s nothing but the distant, Dopplering sound of sirens, the lulling crackle of flames from the bakery behind him and the cars around him, the hiss of smoke from the grenades, and a curious dead spot of noise to his right from the car he’d kicked the man into.  Then, right there, just on the edge of hearing, he hears the careful, crunching noise of someone trying to tiptoe while wearing heavy boots and walking on gravel-strewn ground.

Adrien aims the end of his staff at the man and extends it, just enough that he can brace it against the car with the quiet _clunk_ of metal against metal.  He listens again— _crrrkk, crrrkk_ —adjusts his aim, and unleashes his will.  The other end of his staff rockets forwards, leaving little vortices of smoke in its wake, and smashes into something heavy and solid that provides a moment’s resistance before the inexorable magic of the staff wins out.

Adrien drops the staff as he hears the unmistakable _thud-oof_ of someone hitting the ground and leaps towards the noise, further violence in mind.

The man is prepared for him as he bursts from the smoke cloud.  Adrien has a split second to see the man sparking a flame to life on a shiny Zippo lighter, his cheeks bulging and a fuse-less, half-empty Molotov at his side before he breathes out, spewing forth a blue tongue of flame.  Adrien knows that he’s immune to the fire; in fact he’s certain that some of the accelerant is still burning away harmlessly in his hair and on his chest and shoulders.  He flinches nonetheless, and instead of hammering a punch into the man powerful enough to send him halfway to the cathedral, he fumbles the landing and hits the ground, rolling end over end past his target.

When he looks up, it’s to see Ladybug _whang_ -ing the man across the back of the head with an enormous silver fire extinguisher as wide as her torso, probably one of the ones from the bakery.  The man staggers; Ladybug _whangs_ him again, then douses him liberally in fire-retardant foam.

“Search him,” Ladybug orders as she ties the man hand and foot with her yoyo, expression as unyielding as bedrock.  A quick pat-down reveals where he’s secreted the lighter.

“Well?” Ladybug asks.

Adrien stares at the lighter.  He looks around them, at the suddenly calm battleground.  Orange flames still roar upwards from every window of the bakery as the sirens draw closer, illuminating the faces of the people that form a silent ring about them.  The car fires have started to die away; his nose picks up on the smell of overdone meat as the breeze shifts towards him, and it takes every last ounce of will that he has to keep from vomiting.

He glances towards the bakery again.  Off to the side, Tom is cradling a limp, obviously unconscious Sabine, bright red-and-pink burns covering her right side, her short hair scorched shorter in patches.

“Where’s Marinette?” he asks, voice faint.

When Ladybug fails to respond, he snaps, “Where’s Marinette?”

“Safe,” Ladybug says curtly.  “Give me the lighter.”

Adrien turns the lighter over in his hand.  In the dim, flickering light, he can just make out the words, “VIVE LA LÉGION ÉRANGIÈR” engraved on the back, worn nearly smooth by use.

“This is what happens,” he says, tossing the lighter underhand to Ladybug, “when we take calculated risks.”  The last word comes out in a hard, harsh hiss.

Ladybug catches the lighter in her free hand and glances back over her shoulder at Tom and Sabine.  The corners of her mouth tense as she turns back to see Chat stalking away.

“What are you—“ she begins.

“I’m leaving,” he snaps.  “What does it look like?”

Ladybug crushes the lighter, catches the akuma, purifies it, and restores the world around them in one smooth motion before she runs up beside him.

“Chat, you can’t leave—“

“Watch me.”

“Chat, it’s too _dangerous_ ,” she says, trying to get in front of him.

Adrien whirls on her.  “Dangerous?” he hisses.  “Dangerous?  They were _hurt._   Nearly killed, in point of fucking fact!”

“Look—“

“No,” Adrien snarls.  “No more.  No more throwing innocent people into the line of fire, no more bringing them into _our_ fight.  I’m done with this.  Don’t follow me.”

He runs off in no particular direction, taking a flying leap over the crowd, disappearing into back alleys and down dimly lit streets, taking every random twist and turn he can before he finds the nearest entrance to the catacombs and vanishes.


	3. Sally Forth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spoiler: it all ends in tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many, many thanks to [pozolegirl](http://pozolegirl.tumblr.com/) for lighting a fire under my ass and getting me to finish this, and thanks to [miraculousturtle](http://miraculousturtle.tumblr.com/) for editing.

Ladybug seen atop Parc des Princes.  Ladybug seen near Jardin des Serres d’Auteuil.  Ladybug seen running along rooftops, following the Boulevards des Marechaux.

Marinette scrolls down, and down, and down the list of sightings that she knows traces out her patrol route from the previous night.  There isn’t a single entry for Chat Noir since the big fight at the bakery two nights previously.

She stares at the innocuous little line of text then scrolls up to stare at the equally innocuous little inverted teardrop marker on the inset map.  She shudders slightly, remembering the darkness of her home interrupted by orange-flaring light, the pain like splinters driven into her eyes and throat as she scurried through palls of smoke, the howl of the bakery’s fire alarms going off, her father’s terrified shouting, her mother shoving her out of the way as one of the support beams gives way as flames eat it away, the constant crackling and popping and the intolerable heat.

Marinette takes a shaky breath and squeezes her eyes shut, willing away the memories as they fight their way into the present.  Her eyes prickle with tiredness.

She is Ladybug.  She is the—er, a—Protector of Paris, alongside the ever-dependable Chat Noir, although if their last conversation was anything to go by, he’s probably halfway to China or on a plane to America by now.  And yet with all her power and skill and all her supposed influence she can’t do _this_.  Can’t find Adrien for all that she searches and can’t protect Chat for all that she tries.  She’s Ladybug, the girl who never loses, who overcomes every challenge thrown her way.  Except this one, apparently.

She opens her eyes, glances over the Ladyblog again, and closes the page.  Her screen pops up with the pitifully short article she’d been reading on Adrien’s continued disappearance and she closes that, too, with a faint sense of guilt somewhere in her guts.

“Hey, Tikki?” she asks quietly after a moment.

“Yes, Marinette?” the spirit replies as it flies over and sits atop her monitor.

“Is there any way for you to find out where Chat is?  Like, when he isn’t transformed?”

“No,” Tikki says.  “And I wouldn’t try it.  The way he was when he left, he’d most likely fight you if you tried to bring him back.”

“He would, the stupid macho jerkface,” she mutters grimly to herself.

She feels the weight of Tikki’s steady gaze on her and sighs.  “I know,” she says, “that’s not fair to him.”

She throws her hands up in frustration after a few seconds trying to find the right words.  “But I mean, come on.  I know we’re asking him to fight family, but it’s his father against the lives of a couple million people.  The math isn’t hard.”

“Maybe for you,” Tikki says, bobbing its head to the side in a oddly bird-like motion.  The spirit extends a pointing paw at Marinette.  “His situation is not yours.”

Marinette turns and blinks at the little spirit in frank astonishment.  “Tikki,” Marinette says with a roll of her eyes, “it can’t be that different.”

“Yes it can,” Tikki says.  The kwami’s voice, though its quality is gentle, smacks down with all the weight of millennia and all the immovable authority of emperors, and Marinette finds herself flinching away from the tiny spirit.

“Think, Marinette,” Tikki continues, jabbing its paw down for emphasis, “you are asking him to betray his only family, to throw away a huge part of his life for the city.  For two million faceless people that he’s never met, that turned on him in a heartbeat when the moment was right.  You are asking him to do this for an ideal.”

Tikki’s tone turns gentler.  “His choice is not an easy one, but he would not have been chosen if he wouldn’t make the right decision.  Give him time.”

“Time is what we don’t have,” Marinette retorts.  “I know that you’re thousands and thousands of years old and that all this is happening in like, the blink of an eye to you but Papillon found Chat.”

A trail of goosebumps races down her arms and spine and she hugs her legs to herself, resting her chin on her knees.  “He can do it again,” she says quietly.  “Now that he knows that Chat is still around he’ll push twice as hard.  I won’t be able to keep up, eventually.  These once-a-day attacks are already pushing it.”

“There is nothing that Ladybug and Chat Noir can’t handle,” Tikki says, voice calm and level and quietly reasonable.

The words spark a brief, bright magnesium flare of frustrated anger in her.  "But there isn't a Chat Noir right now," Marinette hisses.  "There can't be.  We can't afford to expose him and I can't freaking find him anyways!"

She slaps a hand across her desk as her words build to a frustrated scream, knocking a wire-mesh pencil holder to the floor.  Pens and pencils clatter across her floor, followed by a brief rain of scattered papers.

A few seconds later, Sabine peeks in.  Tikki whirrs out of sight as Sabine opens the trapdoor more fully, mouth set in a lip-thinning frown of worry.

“Is everything all right, Marinette?” she says, glancing around at the mess.  “Why did you shout?”

“Stubbed my toe, Mama,” Marinette says, smiling weakly.  “I’m sorry for worrying you.”

Sabine looks around again, but after a moment the tension in her shoulders relaxes.

“All right,” Sabine says.  “Please try to keep it down.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Good night, Marinette.”

“Night, Mama.”

Tikki hums back out as the trapdoor shuts with a quiet, reverberant _whunk_.

“I can’t find him,” Marinette repeats, more quietly.  “Can’t find Chat, can’t find Adrien.  What a _fantastic_ Ladybug I am.”

Tikki can but hug Marinette comfortingly on a cheek.

* * *

 

Adrien stumbles over the uneven, rough-hewn limestone, his hands blindly seeking the wall.  Around him is blank nothingness, the all-consuming void of a dragon’s maw, a tangible, oppressive mass that sucks him deeper and deeper into the eternal night, pulling at his limbs step by step.  In the chill, his breath fails to curl with wispy tendrils of mist but instead catches in his lungs and freezes into lacerating crystalline shards in his throat.  He shivers.

“Turn left here,” Plagg says.  “Three steps, two, one.”

Adrien stops and shuffles a quarter turn before he starts walking again.

“Thank you, Plagg,” he mumbles on reflex as his foot brushes against something, probably an ancient abandoned railroad tie.

How long had he been down here?  He’d fallen asleep once or twice, he was—well, reasonably sure.  Without light it’d been hard to tell whether he’d actually slept, once the panic of his flight had given way to fatigue.  He’d remembered sitting to rest, remembered the sudden aches and pains that had rooted in his muscles and joints in the space between one blink and the next.  He must’ve slept.  At one point he must’ve slept.

A fragment of history class bubbles up in his mind.  He’d technically left the catacombs behind and entered the mines after he’d kicked that gate open.

What his history texts hadn’t mentioned, though, was just how damp these narrow, enclosing corridors were.  His fingers brush against a rivulet laden with grit and dust as he takes another step forwards.  This place.  Under the water table.  Right.  Under the river.

He nearly trips on a slightly raised section of floor as he shuffles another few steps forwards.

A stab of hunger makes him flinch, interrupting his next step.  When was the last time, when had he eaten anything?  It’d been something, right, at Marinette’s place.  However long ago, however long ago that was.

Her home.  The bakery.  It’d been warm there.  Comfortable there.  Home there.  Warm.

Not as warm as he was now, though.  Not so warm.  Not so deliciously warm, as though a fire had been lit in his chest, sending a curious tingling down his limbs.  He’d never been this warm.  Not when the fire, when he’d, the man had hit him with the firebomb.  Not when his father had been if not affectionate at least acknowledging and his mother had been there to soften his edges.

The bakery.  Marinette’s home.  Attacked.  The place had been.  Sabine and Tom had been hurt.  Marinette had nearly died.  Because.  All because of him.

He should’ve given up the ring the first chance he got.

Adrien’s legs fold underneath him, and he slumps to the ground.

Plagg whirls as the spirit hears the quiet _whumph_ of impact and, after a moment’s stunned horror, swoops down towards the motionless boy.  With some effort the spirit gets beneath him and shoves hard, rolling Adrien onto his back.

“Adrien?” Plagg says, prodding the boy in his icy-cold cheek.  “Adrien?”

Adrien doesn’t respond.

* * *

 

“Hey, Mari?” Alya murmurs, elbowing her gently in the side.

Marinette flails herself awake—or at least she would if her limbs didn’t feel like loose bundles of damp straw.  As it is, she manages a weak “mngnuuh” as her eyelids peel open.

“You all right?” Alya asks.

“M’fine,” Marinette says, closing her eyes again.

“Yeah, right,” Alya says, casting a wary glance towards the front of the classroom.  “You look like death warmed over.”

“Gee, thanks,” Marinette mutters.  “Feeling the love, Alya.”

“I’m not joking, Mari,” Alya says.  “Shit, she’s looking this way.”

Marinette, with an effort of will, pushes herself into an upright slump in her seat.  Mme. Mendeleiev raises an eyebrow at her, but returns to the chalkboard after a brief moment.  Marinette tries to squint through the disorienting haze of exhaustion at the equations being scribbled across the board, but the numbers and letters blur into incomprehensibility somewhere between her eyeballs and her brain.

She’d been hoping that the concealer would’ve done something at least to hide the lovely purple circles under her eyes, but from how quickly Alya had picked up on it—what had it been, five minutes since she’d walked in and sat?—it hadn’t.

“Why do you have blush under your eyes?” Alya says.

Or maybe it was because it was not, in fact, concealer that she’d put on.  Damn.

“Look, I’m fine,” Marinette says.

“Ms. Dupain-Cheng,” Mme. Mendeleiev says crisply without turning.  “Please try to pay attention for once.”

“Yes, Madame,” Marinette says.

She feels Alya’s gaze on her through the rest of class.

* * *

 

“Marinette,” Alya pleads after class.  “Come on, you’re worrying me sick here.  This has been going on for a week and a half, what’s the matter?”

The matter was that Chat Noir was missing, and Adrien was missing, and Papillon was pressing harder than ever, striking every day, or multiple times a day, and she was going to fall apart at the seams if she had to do this for much longer.  The matter was that Ladybug wasn’t some sort of supreme goddess, Ladybug was human, and her, and she was at the bleeding edge of her limits.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to confide in Alya, could it?  Just a little bit?

Wait, no.  It could.  It very definitely could, if Alya thought that she could get a story out of it.  After all, there was that time when she’d tried to get into Chloe’s locker because she’d caught the most circumstantial evidence possible that she was Ladybug.  This would probably set her foaming at the mouth if she knew that Chat Noir of all people had been sleeping in her room not five meters away.

And more to the point, two nights and three days of regret and shame and nightmares had let Chat’s words seep in.  This really was just a matter between him and Ladybug and Papillon.  Best to limit the number of people involved.  Best to limit the collateral.

“It’s nothing, Alya,” Marinette says woodenly.

“Obviously not if you’re mixing up your makeup that badly,” Alya says.  “Look, is it Adrien?”

She knows that Alya doesn’t mean to, but the mention drives a few more nails into the gaping wound of her failure, and her reply comes back with an edge.  “Yes, now that you mention it,” she starts, sweet venom lacing every word, “that’s exactly what’s happening.”

She doesn’t pause as Alya reels, her words becoming sharper.  “I must be worried sick because the boy I’m in love with has _only_ been missing for almost two weeks with _zero_ leads and _if_ that’s such a problem to you—”

“Hey, woah, woah,” Alya says, putting up her hands defensively, “that’s not what I’m saying.”

“It’s personal,” Marinette warns, her temper abating, leaving guilt flopping helplessly on the shore.  “Leave it.”

Alya looks at her silently for a minute, arms crossed across her chest.  Then she sighs and draws Marinette into a brief but smothering hug.

“Sorry,” Alya says, “but I’m your friend.  Which means that I care about you, whether you want me to or not.”

Marinette stares at Alya, who stares back with arms folded and a gaze as steady and immovable as bedrock, as the heart of a mountain, as the course of the Earth.  It makes Marinette’s own resolve look like a butterfly in a gale.

“Not here,” she mutters, looking away.  “Not now.  Lunch.  And we bring in Nino too, we need a moderating influence.”

Alya nods.

“All right.”

* * *

 

With immense effort, Plagg seizes Adrien by the collar of his shirt and drags him upright against the rough-hewn limestone wall.  Adrien’s head slumps down, his chin resting lightly on his chest.

“Adrien,” Plagg whines.

Adrien fails to respond, fails even to groan, fails to move aside from a light, painfully slow rising and falling of his chest.  Plagg tries smacking Adrien in the face a few times, but the impacts fail to rouse him either.

The kwami settles into a hover before the unresponsive boy and thinks.

Plagg has been around long enough to see a lot of humans reach a lot of unfortunate ends.  Sometimes it’d been the kwami’s chosen doing the ending, or coming across someone as they were ending.  In a few really unfortunate cases it’d been the chosen being ended.

Plagg has tried to stick to warm areas throughout history, but a number of the spirit’s chosen have inevitably had to deal with the cold, real, actual cold, that froze the breath in their lungs and built frost flowers on their lips and beards and kept corpses fresh until the spring thaw.  Several in Russia, a few in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, one Canadian.  The kwami knows what dying from the cold looks like.

Adrien is close.  Not so close as to be imminently doomed, but close to that, and as much as Plagg has tried to keep out of Adrien’s messy mortal business the kwami refuses to see him die from his own stubborn stupidity.

The absolute lack of light is no obstacle to the kwami’s supernatural vision, but it will be for Adrien’s rescuers.  Plagg starts to fly upwards before the kwami remembers that they’ll also need to deal with such mundane things as walking down here instead of simply phasing through the meters of stone and earth above.

Plagg glances left and right, going over a mental map of their wanderings for the past two days.

Then the little spirit hums away.

* * *

 

“All right,” Alya says as they sit together over lunch.  “Spill.”

Marinette casts a slow glance around the classroom they’d elected to spend their lunch break in, her gaze lingering over the windows and the one door in and out of the room.  She looks back at Alya and at Nino, expectant and waiting.

She casts her gaze down at her hands, folded in her lap.

“You asked in that interview a few days ago,” she begins, “that one you got after the attack on the school.  You asked where Chat Noir had gone.”

“Yeah?”

Hoo boy.  Now the hard bit.

“He’s been—well, he was at my place.  Ladybug and I have been sheltering him.”

She hears Alya’s quiet gasp and Nino’s murmured, stunned, “Dude.”

“Specifically, he’s been hiding out at my place,” she says, “because his father attacked him.”

“Shit,” Alya mutters under her breath.

And now for the nuclear-grade bombshell.  “His father is Papillon.”

Dead silence.  Then, after a breath, a low “holy _fuck_ ” from Alya.  She hears Nino take off his cap, sees the brim come into her peripheral vision as he begins scrunching it in his hands.

“You said was,” Alya says.

“Yeah,” Marinette says.  “Was.  He left after that attack on the bakery.”  Marinette tries to repress a shudder as the mention brings up memories of crackling wood and stinging smoke, of the horrible smell of burnt meat and hair, of the weight of her Mama as she’d helped drag her through the house and down the stairs as they smoldered.  She mostly succeeds.

“So that’s why you’ve been so off,” Alya says quietly.

“It’s more than that,” Marinette says.  She considers the details for a moment.

“I took him in,” she says slowly, “because I thought that I could protect him.  Because I was arrogant, and I thought that I could keep him safe from, from.”  She waves her hands in the air, searching for the words.  “From all of this.”

“But, I couldn’t,” she continues, voice shaky.  “I should’ve known after the attack on Nino’s place, I should’ve known after Alya’s home was attacked”—a brief flash of memory again that rises into her thoughts even as the bile sears up her throat, their panic and awe and terror at the battle taking place just outside—“I should’ve _known_ that people I loved would get hurt.”

She watches as her hands clench into involuntary fists, knuckles crackling.  “But no,” she says.  “And now he’s gone, and he could be captured or dead somewhere for all I know and I can’t do a damn thing about it.”

She forces her fists to uncurl as the pressure of her nails biting into her palms starts to hurt.  “He’s in danger, and helping him should be my number one priority, but,” she trails, her voice going quiet for a second.  “I don’t know how.”

More dead silence, all-consuming and pervasive.

Marinette looks up after a few seconds of this to see Alya and Nino staring gape-mouthed at a point about a meter behind her head, Alya’s trembling finger pointing.  Slowly, she turns and looks over a shoulder.

“Ahem.”

The only reason she doesn’t start imitating Alya and Nino is that she knows exactly who is looking back at her.

“Oh,” she says.  “Hi, Plagg.”

A thought strikes her.  “Is Chat nearby?”

“What,” Alya says, her voice high and squeaky, “is that?”

“And how is it related to Chat Noir?” Nino says.

“No time for stories,” Plagg says as Marinette turns to answer them.  “He’s in trouble.  He needs your help.  Now.”

Her response is reflexively instant.  “Where is he?” Marinette asks as she stands, moving briskly towards the door.  She hears chairs slide and rattle across the floor behind her, and Alya and Nino join her a moment later.

“Catacombs,” Plagg says, swooping down into her purse as she clicks it open a fraction.

“Look,” Marinette tells Alya and Nino quietly as they clatter down the stairs to the courtyard, “it might be dangerous.  You don’t have to come, I can do this alone.”

Alya snorts and loops her arm through Marinette’s, locking elbows with her.  Nino comes up on her other side as they head for the main gates and places a hand on her shoulder.

“No offense,” Nino says, “but if whatever happened took out a superhero, I don’t think you’ll be able to handle it all by yourself.  We’re helping.”

Marinette doesn’t bother to mention that Chat isn’t exactly a superhero at the moment, but she nods in acquiescence.

“Right,” Plagg says.  “One of you have a flashlight?”

“I’ll get one from home,” Marinette says.  “How is he?”

“Bad,” Plagg says.  “Hasn’t eaten, hasn’t drunk anything, his clothes are still damp from when he slipped into a puddle yesterday.  He’s cold.”

“We’ll get some blankets then,” Marinette says as the four of them cross the street.

It takes them only a few minutes to collect everything and, with brief reassurances to Tom and Sabine, they depart for the nearest entrance to the network of caves hewn from the rock beneath the city.

Marinette pulls her flashlight from her pocket as they pass through a gate hanging limply from its hinges, its bars twisted, one broken from some terrible force, the bolts securing it to the roof and floor of the cave half-torn from the rock.  It lights a dim oblong of tunnel with a wan yellow light.

“Ah, crap,” Marinette mutters.  She glances hopefully and blindly around.  “Alya, Nino, neither of you have some C batteries on you?”

“No,” Alya says.

Nino rummages in his jeans pockets, then shakes his head.  “Nah.  Sorry.”

“We’ll just need to hurry, then,” Marinette says.

“Uh,” Alya says, pulling her phone from her pocket.  She clicks on the flashlight as demonstration, but Marinette shakes her head.

“Let’s leave those for an emergency,” she says.  “Better to turn them off, actually, and save the battery for when we really need it.”

“This way,” Plagg says brusquely, floating along quickly enough that the three of them are forced into a fast trot.  “The light will not be an issue.”

“What, can you see in the dark?” Alya asks.

“Yes,” Plagg says.  The kwami zips around a corner.

The walls are narrowly spaced, the ceiling low, the air progressively clammier as they become more and more lost within the tunnel network with every step.  Twice Marinette forces them to stop as she hears the echoes of low voices, distance and bearing and more importantly intent rendered incomprehensible by the stone around them.  With every further step the walls seem to close in ever-tighter, the roof creaking downwards, the world contracting around their little party.

“Shit,” Alya curses as Marinette’s light fails after forty minutes, flickering once and dying abruptly, plunging them into an absolute velvet dark.  Nino trips over his own shoe as he tries to stop and hits a wall with his shoulder with a grunt.

“Plagg?” Marinette hisses.  “You there?”

The kwami, curiously warm in the clammy cool, hums over and settles on a shoulder.  “Here,” Plagg says.  “Nino, stay where you are and reach out with your right hand.  Alya’s left hand is right in front of you.”

Marinette hears the quiet rasp of skin on skin.

“Okay,” Nino says.  “I’ve got her.”

“Alya, reach out with your right hand,” Plagg says.  “Now move it right.”

Marinette jumps a little as something brushes against her jacket.  She reaches out tentatively with her left hand and touches what must be Alya’s arm.  She closes her hand on it and lets her grip slide down the appendage until she reaches Alya’s hand.

“We’re good,” Marinette says.

“I can see that,” Plagg says.  “Take ten steps forwards and turn left.”

Progress is far slower with the human chain, and another swathe of indeterminate minutes pass before Plagg says, “We’re here.  He’s two steps in front of you, to your left.”

They immediately break apart, and Alya’s face is lit with a sudden flare of light as she turns her phone on.  She turns the lit screen away from her, briefly blinding Nino and Marinette as the light washes over them in turn.

Chat Noir is corpse-pale and still.

Marinette dumps her bag to the floor and drops to her knees beside him, turning his head aside so that she can press her index and middle finger to the side of his neck.  She holds her breath and waits.

“He’s still alive,” she says, “but cold.  Really cold.”

Nino steps up and kneels beside her, an old, plaid-patterned woolen blanket in his hands.  Marinette grabs Chat by the shoulders and pulls him away from the wall, giving him enough room to wrap the blanket around Chat’s upper body.

“We need to get him out of here,” Marinette says.

“It’s broad daylight out,” Nino says.  “We’ll draw a lot of attention hauling him around.”

“We can’t just leave him here, though,” Marinette argues, grabbing another blanket from Alya and wrapping it around his shoulders.  “He’s going to freeze to death.”

Alya opens up the blankets wrapped around Chat and shoves Nino towards him before bundling the both of them up.  “Lemme check when sundown is,” Alya says.

“We’ll need to wait until at least midnight,” Marinette says.

“Another ten hours, then,” Alya groans.

“Look, Nino and I will stay with him, go back and get some heat packs, hot water bottles, something, Mama has them in a closet somewhere.”  She fumbles for the flashlight and gives it to Alya.  “Can you get some spare batteries for this too?”

“You two going to be all right?” Alya asks.

“We’ll be fine,” Nino says.

“Plagg, go with Alya,” Marinette says.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can, all right?” Alya says, giving the both of them a quick hug.  “I’ll tell your parents what’s going on.”

“Tell my mom too?” Nino says, leaning forwards and giving Alya a quick kiss on the cheek.

“Sure,” Alya says.  “Stay safe, you two.  Three, I mean.”

With a final worried glance at them, Alya departs with Plagg leading the way.  The tunnel is again plunged into deep, oppressive silence as the darkness closes its maw around them.

Marinette tries counting out the seconds as Nino shifts against Chat, trying to get into a more comfortable position.  She loses count after a while, the time slipping away into the creeping shadows, into the drone of city traffic above them, the soft rhythm of Nino’s breathing.  She strains to hear anything else.

After a while, Marinette jerks awake at the soft, echoing scrape of shoes on stone.  Her hand goes automatically to the purse dangling at her side, feeling the weight and warmth of Tikki within.

“Guys?” Alya says a second later.  The far end of the tunnel lights up as the flashlight’s beam sweeps over it; Marinette shields her eyes just in time as the light sweeps over her and the bundle of Nino and Chat in turn.

“Over here,” Marinette says as Alya hurries over, a large backpack slung over one shoulder thumping irregularly against her hip.

“Hey babe,” Nino says.

“How is he?” Alya says, unzipping a pouch on the backpack and handing over a pair of plastic pouches—heat packs, Marinette sees as she squints at them, the multiple-use kind that activated when you cracked something inside or popped it or something.  Marinette bends them sharply and hands them over to Nino as Alya pulls another few from a side pocket.

“Still cold,” Nino says as he tucks the pouches underneath Chat’s arms.  “Breathing is still slow, kinda shallow.”

“Alya, what time is it?” Marinette asks.

“Just after four,” Alya says.  “Here, your Mom gave us something to eat while we were down here.”

Nino accepts a croissant from Alya as Marinette wraps another pair of heat packs around Chat’s upper thighs and secures them with a roll of medical tape.  “My mom is freaking out, isn’t she?” Nino says.

“Putting it lightly, yes,” Alya says.  “Here, Marinette.”  She hands over another croissant before continuing.  “She wants you back before eight.”

“Did you tell her about what was going on?” Marinette says as Nino growls and takes a bite.

“As much as I could,” Alya says.  “Told them that we’d found someone in critical condition and we couldn’t risk moving them for a while.”

“And let me guess,” Nino says, “she didn’t buy it.”

“Wanted me to put you on,” Alya confirms.

Nino huffs out a sigh and takes a bite from his croissant, chewing reflectively.  After a minute he swallows and says, “I’ll stay as long as you guys need me.”

“Nino, I don’t want you to get in trouble with your folks,” Marinette says.

Nino rolls his eyes at her.  “Look, Mom isn’t going to get off her shift until ten, and with any luck she’s going to be stuck in the ward doing paperwork until eleven.  It’ll be fine, I’ll get shouted at a bit and that’s it.”

“That is a long way from fine, Nino,” Marinette says.

“Marinette, leave it,” Alya says, laying a hand on Marinette’s arm.

“Alya—“

“Leave it,” Alya repeats.  “Nino, scooch over, if we need to stay down here that long we’ll freeze same as him.”

Marinette stares as Alya curls up next to Nino, then sighs and nestles herself next to Chat, opposite Alya and Nino, Plagg settling on her shoulder closest to Chat.

“You two get some rest,” she says to them, voice low.  “Plagg and I will keep watch.”

* * *

 

The bakery’s delivery entrance shines a jaundice-yellow rectangle out into the streets as the three of them approach with Chat Noir held between them.  He swings in his makeshift hummock of blankets as they trot up to their welcoming committee.

“Nino!” a woman standing off to the side of the door snaps.  Her skin is of a shade that blends almost seamlessly into the night, so that it appears as though they’re being addressed by a floating, rather irate set of lime-green hospital scrubs wearing neon orange-pink athletic sneakers and adorable frog-patterned socks.

“Hi, Mom,” Nino says with a resigned sigh.  He lets go of his end of the blanket as Tom hurries up and takes Chat’s limp weight in his arms, stuffing his hands into his jeans pockets and hunching up his shoulders.  Alya sags a little as she releases her burden, rubbing life back into her arms and shoulders before she straightens as Nino’s mother storms towards them like a one-woman cavalry charge.  She lets herself sag again as Nino’s mother goes right past her, an admonitory finger aimed at her son.

“He’s still really, really cold,” Marinette tells Tom quietly as the scolding starts.

“—can’t believe you were so irresponsible, running off like that without telling anyone, in the middle of school—“

“I’ll run a warm bath,” Tom says.

Beside them, Nino is trying to defend himself.  “Mom, they needed my help—“

“And so you skip school for half a day?” his mother replies heatedly.  “You disappear without a trace?  I nearly called the _police_ before Alya called!”

“We—We needed to save him,” Nino protests.

“Right,” his mother scoffs.  “Save who, exactly?”

His mother glances sideways at the still figure swaddled toes to chin in blankets.  “A cosplayer,” she says neutrally.  “And why couldn’t you just call an ambulance?”

“That’s not a cosplayer,” Nino says.

“Really,” his mother says.  “Next you’re going to be telling me that he’s Chat Noir.”

A moment of silence.

Sabine comes up to the little group and lays a hand on Nino’s mother’s shoulder.  “You’d better come inside.”

* * *

 

Nino’s mother stares down at the still, steaming surface of her mug of tea.

“It’s too dangerous,” she says eventually.  “You can take him to our place, I can take a few days’ sick leave starting tomorrow.”

“Your place already got attacked,” Marinette says.  At Sabine’s upraised eyebrow she says, “I saw it on the news, one of those supervillain guys was heading right towards their building, straight line.”

“It isn’t as though here is any safer,” Nino’s mother argues.  “Ladybug stopped the attack near our home but this place nearly burned to the ground.  It made the headlines for two days running.”

“This place is probably safer than anywhere else in the city,” Marinette insists, rising to her feet.

“Really,” Nino’s mother says.  “And why’s that?”

“Ladybug’s close,” Marinette says.

She flushes as three pairs of eyes land on her and lowers herself back into her seat.  “We’ve been coordinating,” she mumbles.  “Asked me to keep it secret until all of this blew over.”

“Can’t she be close somewhere other than here?” Nino’s mother asks.

“Uh,” Marinette says.  “I don’t know, I’d need to ask her.”

“We’ll keep him here for now,” Sabine says.  “At least until we can talk with Ladybug and work something out.  Marinette, when can you call her soonest?”

“I’ll go do that right now,” Marinette says, grateful for the opening, and scrambles up the stairs.

She nearly runs into her father as he’s walking down.  “How is he, Papa?” Marinette asks.

“In clean clothes, in bed, and still out cold,” Tom replies.  “I think he’s out of the worst of it, though.”  He frowns thoughtfully down the stairs.  “Isn’t Nino’s mother a doctor?  Might want to have her take a look at him.”

“Maybe you should mention it to her?” Marinette says.

Tom snorts.  “She’s formidable, all right,” he says.  “Nearly harangued your mother into submission before we convinced her to wait.”  His massive hand swallows up her shoulder in a brief grip before he shoves her lightly towards her room.  “Go.  Keep him company.  Your mother and I will talk to her.”

Marinette nods, accepting the command, and moves robotically up the stairs to sag into the chair next to Chat.  Her mind sparks fitfully with a last few comprehensible thoughts as the demands that her days of vigilance have placed on it catch up to her.  She's distantly aware of Nino's mother coming up and conducting a brief examination of Chat, and manages to register the fact that words are spoken to her when Alya and Nino come up as well and say their goodbyes.  She returns Alya's hug, at least.  She manages to mumble something to her mother as Sabine comes up to check on them a little later.

Then, body catching up to mind, she slumps forwards and passes out.

* * *

 

Adrien wakes in delicious warmth, his fingers and toes tingling with pins and needles.  He shifts experimentally; his limbs respond, but sluggishly.

So.  Had he bitten it?  Was this what the other side felt like?  Just endless, lovely warmth?

Rather cooler than he had been expecting, though.

Then he hears a quiet whining hum that can only be Plagg’s snoring, and a tiny, vibrating mass on his forehead that can only be Plagg curled up on him.

Right then.

Now he needs to figure out where he is.

He flares his nostrils and breathes in slowly, lightly.  A faint hint of something floral, almost painfully, chemically so, and beneath that a flat odor, something medicinal, maybe soap or something, and beneath that vanilla and sugar and butter—

Adrien almost sits bolt upright, stopped only by the utter lack of strength in his muscles.

He’s back at the bakery.   _He should not be back at the bakery_.

Right, first order of business, he needs to get this goddamn weight off of his chest and abdomen, then he needs to leave.

He cracks open an eyelid, wincing a little as the predawn morning light spears him in the retinas.

Marinette is lying sprawled diagonally across him, her head pillowed on her crossed arms, an emerald green knit blanket across her shoulders rising and falling as she breathes in and out in the slowed pace of comatose-deep sleep.  Her hair is still in its pigtails rather than hanging loosely.

Well damn.  Even if he wasn’t weak as a kitten—ha ha—he wouldn’t be able to get loose of this cocoon of blankets without waking her.

The trapdoor creaks open a fraction, letting a thin sliver of light lance across the floor, diagonally up and over Marinette’s back, and onwards until it’s stopped by the wall.  The sliver widens, then is eclipsed as Tom enters with a bowl in hand.  The smell of some rich, meaty soup wafts towards him as the big man steps into the room, and Adrien’s stomach convulses in a sudden, desperate spasm with a growl loud enough to wake Marinette.

“Hm?” she mumbles, blinking open sleep-crusted eyes.  Tom sets the bowl on Marinette’s desk with a quiet _chink_ of silverware rattling off of ceramic, and rests a hand across Marinette’s back.

“Come on, sweetie,” he murmurs to her, “time to get up.  Mama’s made breakfast.”

“Mm,” Marinette says, and buries her face into Adrien’s blankets.

Tom sighs, wraps an arm around Marinette’s waist, and hauls her up like a somewhat wriggly sack of flour.  Marinette protests weakly as he carries her down the stairs, legs kicking.  After a minute Tom returns, picks up the bowl, and settles down in the vacated chair, the spoon like looking like a toothpick in his hand.

“Can you sit up, son, or do you need help?” Tom says.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Adrien mumbles as he wriggles and caterpillar-crawls himself up the back of the lounge.  He rests for a moment with eyes closed, breathing a little heavily.

He hears the spoon clink against the bowl, followed shortly by Tom’s deep sigh.

“That, I think,” Tom says, “is a matter for further discussion.  Open up, son.”

I can feed myself," Adrien mumbles with a faint spark of insulted pride. Tom shrugs, sets the bowl aside, and helps free Adrien’s arms from his cocoon of blankets before handing him the bowl.

The thin broth inside sloshes about as Adrien raises it to his lips in trembling hands and sips at it cautiously.  The broth is rich and just a hairsbreadth too warm to be properly drinkable, but the taste of actual food, actual drink that isn’t streaks of filthy water seeping from stone walls overrides everything and before he quite knows what’s happened the bowl is empty and he’s setting it in his lap with a sigh.

“Careful, son,” Tom says, “not too much too fast or you’ll throw it all—“

Tom breaks off and just barely manages to avoid the stream of bile that spews forth onto the blankets.  As his stomach heaves for a second and third time, Adrien aims it off to the side, avoiding the chaise lounge and splattering the hardwood flooring with his just-ingested broth.

“Oh dear,” Tom says.  “Sabine!”

Adrien watches dully as Marinette’s parents clean up his mess with mop and bucket, taking away his soiled blankets and stuffing them into a plastic garbage bag.  Tom hauls him up carefully and brings him to their small shower-bath; Adrien takes a few mouthfuls of tap water from the sink to wash the burn of acid from his mouth and throat before he strips from his vomit-speckled clothing and cleans himself off under the hot spray.  He hears someone come in through the shower-bath’s frosted glass, sees them kneel and gather up his old clothing before leaving another set and leaving.

He shuts off the shower, dries himself off methodically, dresses, and traipses outside to see Tom standing there with a second bowl of broth.

“Up you go, son,” he says, helping Adrien plod upstairs and settling him into Marinette’s desk chair.  “Sip at it this time,” Tom tells Adrien, handing him the bowl.  “Need a spoon?”

Adrien shakes his head and raises the bowl to his lips, sipping carefully at the warm broth within.

Halfway through the bowl Adrien bites his lip and sets it carefully aside.

“No need to be shy about it,” Tom says, “Sabine made a few liters, we have enough to spare.”

“It’s not that,” Adrien says quietly.

“Ah,” Tom says after a thoughtful pause.  “Let me guess.  You think, because we took you in, that your father attacked our home.  You think that you own a measure of responsibility for that because he would not have attacked here without your presence.  You think that because the attack was partially your fault that you don’t belong here.”

“Um,” Adrien says after a few moments’ shocked silence—did Tom have a degree in psychotherapy or mindreading or something?  “Yes.  More or less.”

Tom bursts out into a deep, rumbling chuckle, shaking his head as he reaches over and picks up the bowl.

“We knew the risks when we brought you in,” Tom says, pushing the bowl gently into Adrien’s hands.  “We accepted them, and if that was what happened then the only people to blame is ourselves.”

“And no argument,” he continues as Adrien opens his mouth.  “Not a word.  Only thing I want you to be doing with that mouth of yours right now is eating.”

He watches as Adrien meekly brings the bowl to his mouth and sips some more broth.

“Look, son,” Tom says, more soberly, “we’ll keep you hidden as long as we can.  And if you don’t want to stay around here anymore, well, I have a cousin, works in London, who’d be more than happy to take you in.  If that’s not far enough for you, Sabine has family in China.  But we’re not going to turn you out.”

“He’ll keep coming after you,” Adrien protests, his voice hoarse and reedy.

Tom shrugs.  “He can’t do it forever,” he says.  “This too shall pass.”

Tom rises and slaps a hand down on Adrien’s shoulder.  “I’ll leave you be,” he says.  “I’ll be back with more soup in an hour or so.  For now, get some rest.”

“I owe you—“ Adrien begins, but Tom holds up a hand, rumbling his deep chuckle again.

“Precisely nothing,” Tom says, finishing his sentence.  He turns and trots down the steps, leaving the trapdoor open behind him.  Adrien finishes the broth and sets the bowl aside, eyes fixed at nothing.

This too shall pass, Tom had said.  This too shall pass.

In theory he was right.  He could leave, scarper off to London or halfway across the globe.  Papillon would, eventually, come to realize that he wasn’t here and he’d return to his usual pace of mayhem.  His Lady could easily take care of Paris until then.  And, after all, with her Miraculous Ladybug no one was actually being hurt in the interim.  She’d brought the _dead_ back before with her powers, after all.

He could do that, just leave.  Just abdicate his responsibility, it wasn’t like anyone would really mind in this particular instance, just leave until the heat was off of him

He vaguely notices as Marinette walks in and glances at him concernedly, a mug of strong coffee cupped in her hands.  She settles down on the lounge, wrinkles her nose at the smell, fetches a canister of some sinus-stinging air freshener that he supposes is supposed to smell of strawberries or something and sprays it liberally around the room before sitting down again.

Papillon was a monster.  His father was just desperate, and lonely, and desperately grieving, and hurting.

And willing to plow anyone and everyone down in his way.  Including his own son.

Apparently the road to hell really was paved with good intentions.

And what if he did take Sabine and Tom up on their offer?  What if he did run away?  What was the maximum range on those akuma, anyways?  They didn’t seem to be actual butterflies, but even then he doubted that Papillon was really capable of targeting someone on the other side of the world.  And his Lady could manage in his absence.

What was important, after all, was keeping the Miraculous out of his hands.

And no one would really be hurt.

In his mind’s eye Adrien sees himself running, running, running, fleeing into the ever-retreating horizon, the hounds of his past baying for his blood, sees himself hiding and slinking and creeping as the swarming darkness pursues, with a lone figure standing in its path.  He sees the long lonely road before him, the shackles of responsibility falling away from him, from Ladybug too as she vanishes like smoke in the night.  He thinks he can see all of it in that moment of clarity.

One moment of cowardice for a lifetime of safety.

One moment.

Adrien makes his decision.

“Marinette?” Chat says quietly.

“Hm?”

“Can you call Ladybug, please?”

Marinette looks at him for a long moment; Chat looks back, calm and composed, expression tranquil.

“Okay,” she says.  She walks over to her desk, sets down her mug next to his bowl, and picks up her phone, disconnecting it from her charger and walking towards the staircase up to her loft bed.  “All right then.”

Marinette clambers up onto her terrace and shuts the skylight.  She takes a minute to look around, but no one is looking in her direction, and it isn’t as though she can climb down the outside.  Well, she probably could, but she’d also probably break her legs or something in the process.

On second thought, she probably should’ve gone downstairs for this.

Oh well.

“Tikki,” she murmurs.  “Spots on.”

A moment later, Ladybug cracks open the skylight and hops down into her room.

“Chat Noir,” Ladybug says to Chat in greeting.  He frowns up at her from his sickbed.

“Where’s Marinette?” he says.

“Oh, she decided to stay up on the terrace,” she replies, “give us a bit of privacy.”

Chat nods, his gaze distant for a second before it focuses again on her.  He sits up straight.

“Papillon is Gabriel Agreste,” he says.  “The observatory is around the back of the house.  Just look for the broken window.”

She goes stiff with shock as he looks at her with perfect model poise.  Which makes sense.  Since he, uh, is a model.  The same one she’s been crushing on.  The same one that’s gone missing.  Because his freaking father is a supervillain, who has been terrorizing Paris for several months now.

She is not going to be getting that internship.

“Oh,” she manages.  “O—Oh.”

She refocuses on him.  Chat’s—Adrien’s gaze is distant and unfocused behind the mask she’d made for him.  His lower lip quivers, very slightly.

She steps closer.  “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” he says, looking away.  “Just, ah, recovering.  Thank you for your concern, my Lady.”

“Are you sure—“

“I’m fine,” he says firmly.  He makes eye contact for a moment before he looks down again, at his hands folded neatly in his lap.  “Is there anything else?”

“When do you think you’ll be at one hundred percent again?”

“Give me two days,” he says.

“All right.”  She considers whether to press the issue and decides against it.  “See you then.”

She heads up to her terrace and undoes her transformation, then hops back down after an appropriate delay.

“Hey, Chat,” she says.  “How was the, talk—“

A steady stream of tears is plopping onto his lap.

“Chat,” she says, hurrying over.  She stops as he holds up a hand and turns away, swiping furiously at his eyes.

“No, no, I’m fine,” he says between shaking breaths.  “I’m fine, I’m fine, I—I don’t need help.”

“Chat, what’s wrong?” she says.

“ _Nothing_ is wrong,” he says, his voice sharpening to a snarl for a moment.  “Just—nothing is wrong.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” Marinette says.  She decides to take the risk and reaches out, touching him lightly on his shoulder.  “Look, I’m—I’m here for you if you need me.”

“I don’t need you,” he says, a tremble working its way into his voice.  “I don’t need anyone, I’m _fine_.”

“Yes you do,” Marinette says as he starts shaking.  “Yes you do, and I’m here, Chat, I’m here.  I’m here for as long as you need me.”

Something breaks in him and he latches onto her, his body racked with quiet sobs, the tears soaking into his mask and trailing down his cheeks.

“Please don’t leave me,” he sobs into her, his voice increasing to a desperate whine.  “Please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me alone, please, please, please.”

“I won’t,” Marinette murmurs to him as she holds him close.  “I won’t, I promise I won’t,” again, and again, and again, holding him close, letting his tears soak into her shirt until his breathing slows and he relaxes into sleep.

* * *

 

“You ready?” Ladybug asks him as they stand on her terrace.

“As I’ll ever be,” Chat says as he stares at the Agreste mansion.  His fingers brush gently against one of her flowers.

Neither of them move.  Eventually Ladybug says, “Look, the Dupain-Chengs will always be there if you need them.”

Chat nods absently.

“And I’ll always be here for you,” she continues.

He chuckles a little.  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, my Lady,” he says.

“I’m not.”

He bobs his head to the side in acknowledgement.  “As you say.”  He closes his eyes and breathes in deeply through his nostrils.

“Right,” he says.  “Let’s go.”

 


End file.
